boys in the parlour
by redcat512
Summary: They think you're some kind of weirdo feminist, and sure, you are that too. But that's not all you are. (A story about Olivier as a trans-man.)


**A/N:** To be honest I'm not really sure what happened here. Insomnia, for one. Then some other things. Alcohol, probably. A touch of insanity, and a liberal pour of SJWism.

Here I've used the word _female_ to mean person born with a vagina, etc, and _woman_ to mean a person's actual gender identity.

* * *

It didn't matter, when you were a kid.

Okay, so you loathed dresses, and so you climbed trees and wrestled with Alex rather than play with dolls, but it didn't really _matter_ , because the Armstrongs have always valued powerful women, so while sometimes your mother stared at you in bemusement, she never stopped you from playing in the dirt and keeping your hair cropped to your chin.

Then teenhood hit, and with it, puberty, and sex, and appearance, and you wanted none of it, so you shaved your hair to half an inch, put piercings in your nose, your ears, your eyebrow, your lip, wore baggy men's clothes, and refused to answer to Olivia.

 _Armstrong_ , your friends called you, _bitch_ , everyone else called you, or, sometimes, _bastard_.

You considered _Oliver_ , but it sounds like the kind of incompetent loser who pushes paper by day and goes home to his equally mild and boring girlfriend at night, and you were never that person. _Olivia_ is a stronger name, but that's a woman's name, and that's equally not you.

Your family fight you about your name, because you were named after a great-great-somebody or other, so suggestions for new names get thrown out. To be honest, you don't care about great-great-who-the-hell-ever, but when Mother suggests the spelling _Olivier_ , you're willing enough to compromise. It sounds kind of like Olivia, and kind of like Oliver, but it's more masculine than Olivia and more fitting than Oliver, and yeah, it's kinda perfect.

Your family doesn't get it: they think you're some kind of weirdo feminist, and sure, you are that too, and yeah, some small part you does want to break down gender roles, because you know what? Women get a fucking raw deal. But that's not the only thing, is it, because gender roles ain't got nothing to do with the disconnect you feel to your naked body, gender roles ain't got nothing to do with the way you turn around to see who they're talking about when they call you _she_.

* * *

It's a damn shame, you sometimes think, because you're an ambitious bastard if there ever was one, and this piece of shit world you were born into wants to stomp you down into the ground twice over. Once, because you were born female, and twice, you don't even have the decency to pretend to accept your place and play at being a woman.

Your family's been military since the beginning of time, or whatever, and good god, you want to continue that, but they have that whole thing, don't they, about queers, and sure, you're not even especially into girls anyway, but that wouldn't stop some smart mouthed idiot screaming _lesbian_ at you because he's got the wrong end of the stick. In the alternative, they'd get the _right_ end of the stick, and beat you all the way back home with it, wouldn't they, because they sure as shit don't take the likes of you, either.

You'd try to reconcile yourself to being a loser gangbanger or whatever, since that's apparently what you look like, only then you get caught pickpocketing by a little old lady, only she's not a little old lady at _all_ , she's a cross-dressing fucking army colonel, fuck your life.

He won't report you to the civvie police if you'll meet with him, he says. Just to talk.

 _Yeah, okay, sure,_ you say, because he knows very well which family you belong to, and he's holding all the cards, here. Yeah, he's probably going to blackmail the shit out of you into doing weird kinky sex shit or whatever, but it's not like you have much of a choice.

He doesn't, though, because when you meet him later, him all dressed up like the upstanding male officer he'd like to be seen as, and he only buys you tea and tries to bully you into applying for the Academy.

 _What the fuck_ , is your response, because he can't possibly be that much of a do-gooder idiot, right – but no, he must be, because he's telling you he's seen your scores, he's watched you at the firing range, he's also seen your goddamned _brother_ in the Academy, and he thinks you can do better than petty theft.

 _You don't get it_ , you say, _people like me, we don't just go off to the army all nice and dandy and do what the fuck ever. The statistics are fucking awful for females in the army, hell, the statistics are shit for females anywhere. You throw in my smart mouth and my short hair, you got a recipe for disaster. Not only will I not amount to anything, I'll be lucky to get out alive._

He smiles, but it's crooked, bitter: Y _oung man,_ he addresses you, and that shocks you into listening because fuck if no one but your closest friends ever saw the real you, and hell, you had to _tell_ them, a million times, at least, before they stopped calling you _she_ , and this guy's just pulled it out of thin air, _don't you lecture me how hard it is for people like **us**_.

 _Us,_ you echo, questioning, and remember that he probably wasn't all garbed up with the explicit purpose of catching a pickpocket army brat; hell, he was probably out for a night on the town, and now you hold as much blackmail power over him as he does you – if not more.

 _I'm not telling you it won't be hell,_ he continues, _and I'm not naïve enough to say that you should be whoever you are and damn the consequences. You'd have to either pretend to be a born male, and to be honest, with how well-known your family is amongst the commissioned officers, that's very unlikely. Or you could do the most awful thing I could ever suggest to one of us, which is hide yourself. Pretend to play their game._

A part of you breaks, because, okay, you're not stupid, but here's this old guy telling you can amount to something, maybe, and for a second, you thought maybe he was going to tell you it was going to be okay, that it was all in your head, and that you could waltz into the military all open and shit.

 _Hide yourself_ , he continues, _and bide your time. Our time will come. It probably won't be in my lifetime, and it will probably be built on our broken backs, but eventually, it will get better._

 _You want to recruit me to a suicide mission_ , you ask, only it's not really a question at all, you just want to say it out loud, watch his face when you phrase it like that, like what it really is. _You want me to spend my life fighting for a thing I won't see the fruits of, only to be rewarded for my efforts with, **at best** , death in my old age._

That crooked smile is back. _Only insomuch as **life** is a suicide mission. Why live at all, really, if we're all just going to die?_

* * *

That fucker got to you.

You made no promises, right, but he got into your _brain_ , and now you can't stop thinking about it.

He invites you along when he goes out as a chick, and it's bizarre, because he told you to dress nice, but he didn't tell you to wear a dress, so you didn't, hell, you stole some of Alex's old shirts that don't have holes in them, and you cleaned up something nice, in nice trousers, and you even found a tie somewhere, and the Colonel made you take out all the jewellery in your face.

While you're out, someone thinks the two of you are mother and son and damn if that doesn't crack you up til you're hysterical and have to be asked to leave.

He doesn't mind though, and apologises for his 'boy' on the way out, while pretending to need your arm to rest on.

He's a good sort. You knew that, already, but he really is a fucking do-gooder. He's got his eyes wide open, though; he's right, he's not naïve. He wants to believe in a better tomorrow, but that doesn't mean he believes that today is anything but a gutter-heap of crap.

You also notice that he's not above using his feminine wiles to get what he wants. That makes you chuckle, because there's that weapon that males always go on about, about how women have all the _true_ power, which is fucking bullshit, but that doesn't mean it's not _a_ power, even if it's a shitty consolation prize. If nothing else, the power is in being underestimated, which is tragic if you think too hard about it, but advantageous if you just fucking use it.

At the end of the night, you go home, and lie awake a long time.

* * *

When Alex mentions the Academy the next day, you shock the hell out of your family by announcing your intention to apply.

 _What?_ You say, grinning. _Didn't think I'd let Alex ruin our name all by himself, did you?_

* * *

By the time your first day rolls around (because like hell were you going to not get in, _really_ ) your hair's back to chin length, and you've even borrowed some of the colonel's lip-gloss. You're never going to be a make-up kind of guy, but lip-gloss you can handle. Some days you even throw on a little eyeliner, but with your colouring, anything too outrageous stands out a mile, and anything too subtle isn't worth the effort.

It's no different to what _he_ does, is it, because you're only cross-dressing. You're playing a part, and it's not _you_ , it's not who you are, just like Maria isn't _him_ , but you'll be damned if some weirdo old man can beat you at this game, when you've got the socialised and anatomic advantage. People will see what they want to see, and when they look at you, they see the daughter of the Armstrongs, and yeah, okay, she's a little weird, but she's got a mean right hook and doesn't back down from a fight, so if they don't look too close, all they see is yet another Armstrong – eccentric, but competent as hell, and with a lot of family members to punch them in the throat if they decide to give any grief.

* * *

He wasn't lying when he said it would be hell.

At the best of times, the army is hell. You're no bleeding heart, but even you get sick of holding your comrade's entrails in as they bleed out or of seeing kids shot in the head because their eyes are the wrong colour.

It's hell on you as a female. Your reputation doesn't keep away all the worst elements, and the infirmary gets used to seeing you in there with a black eye or two. Usually the other guy got it worse, though, and they get a hell of a lot less sympathy, because females are allowed to cry sometimes (not that you're inclined to, _psah_ ), even in the army, and males aren't, full-stop. You never stop appreciating how lucky you are though, compared to the others. You're lucky that you spent your formative years beating up men twice your size without blinking, because you've read the statistics, and you've picked up the pieces more often than you'd like to think about from all those that couldn't fight back.

It's hell on you to pretend to be a woman. You're so sick of men hitting on you, and the thing is, you like men just fine, but the _way_ they do it is sickening because most of them are such sexist pieces of shit who ignore the fact that you're ten times as competent as them and call you _sweetheart_ , and even the decent ones still look at you and see a _girl_ , and not _you_.

It makes you hate yourself, or at least your body, because although it kind of bothered you in the past, at least you could put men's clothes on and people would more or less see who you wanted them to see, but now you have to wear fairly form-fitting uniforms, and you've made a point to grow your hair out and wear that stupid fruity lip-gloss, and people see completely the wrong thing, even while there's blood on your hands and dirt on you face.

Hell was probably an understatement, to be honest.

And yet, you can't bring yourself to regret being here. Even if you're miserable on the personal front, for the first time in your life, you're actually challenged. You're finally _doing_ something.

* * *

Your Ishvallan tour ends and they assign you to Briggs.

It's the dead-end assignment, everyone snickers, it's where military careers go to die.

You're hard pressed to disagree, when you arrive.

It's bloody cold, for one thing, and it's the middle of nowhere, and you're not sure why anyone would want to fight over this godforsaken piece of rock in the mountains, but they sent you here, so here's where you'll be.

Then, you fight a small skirmish with Drachma, and you start to see why Briggs is here.

The Ishvallans were miserable and desperate civilians. Ishval was a slaughterhouse.

Meanwhile, Drachma is a superpower with hundreds of thousands of soldiers at its disposal. Sure, most of them are off fighting a bigger war hundreds of miles away on their western border, but a small portion of them has been dedicated to trying to squeeze their way through the bottle neck of these mountains down into Amestris. There's some talk of peace treaties, but it hasn't happened yet, and if it ever does eventuate, it's still going to be a treaty stained with decades of blood.

Drachma is a real enemy. Drachma is a real threat.

* * *

Through the years, you make your way up the ranks. You're the only female in Briggs, and you thought that was going to be your death sentence, but it's actually a blessing in disguise because there are no _actual_ women for you to be compared to and found lacking, so there's less reason for people's hackles to rise around you. Around actual women you always feel like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Or a sheep in wolves clothing, you're not really sure.

That also means you can act more like yourself, and you stop even half-heartedly trying to put on you 'lady' voice, and you're just you. And since there are no women to compare to, no one even notices there's anything wrong. A fake wolf can pass if there are no real ones around to call him on it.

Sometimes the other men forget you're female. You're one of them, one of the Briggs men.

* * *

The first time that Roy Mustang hits on you, you don't notice anything out of the ordinary.

Yet another fuckboy, as your old friends would have said. Everyone knows that Roy Mustang thinks himself some sort of playboy, and worst yet is he's often drawn to powerful, bitchy women. Of course you'd make that list, even if you're only two out of three.

The thing is, though, you've spent your whole life the prisoner of assumptions, and sure, you've developed Prisoner's Syndrome along the way and make them just as much as any person, but sometimes you're faster to see where those conclusions were wrong, faster than the average idiot who really is all he appears to be, because you've spent your life on the wrong end of people's expectations so you know what that's like, at least.

So then you start to notice that although Mustang's second in command is a beautiful, competent, _bitchy_ woman (because _bitchy_ is code for 'female refusing to be mild and meek and a fucking footstool'), and yet he never so much as looks at her twice, and you notice that he never sees the same woman twice, and that he spends more time talking about miniskirts than he does perving on anyone actually wearing one, you start to wonder.

Only, he keeps harassing you. Not that you couldn't put a stop to it if it really bothered you, but that's not the point. He doesn't even stare at your tits, or anything, at least, not more so than anyone who's faced with them (they really are pretty impressive, you'll admit, even if they feel alien to you), just follows you around like he's not even sure why.

The world might be ending and Mustang's following you around like a lost puppy.

That's when you realise, and that's when you call Grumman up to bitch him out because he's a fucking manipulative lying piece of shit.

 _He's one of yours, isn't he?_ You demand, and you don't even clarify who you mean, or what you mean by _yours_. _Are you recruiting a fucking **army** or something?_ _And don't think I don't know what your plans for him are, only can you imagine what kind of shitstorm is going to hit all of us when he's found out? The **Führer** , are you **serious**? Everything we've worked for, everything, will go down the drain._

 _My dear- Olivier_ , he corrects, because of course you haven't told him this is a secure line, so of course he can't call you _boy_ , only how dare he be careful about that when he's done _this_.

You tell him as much.

He sighs. _Firstly, at this point, don't you think we have bigger fish to fry? It won't matter in a few months' time if we fail, and if we succeed, then the entire current situation will be turned on its head and we'll be playing a whole other game. And I'm not sure why you say **when** he's found out, when, as far as I know, you and I are the only ones who found out without being told. Which, I'd like to ask, how you figured it out._

 _That he's so gay he can barely walk straight, you mean?_ You ask, rudely. _He's into **me** , for fuck's sake, Grumman._

 _I'm not sure I know what you mean, Olivier._ He says, dryly. _You pass very well for a woman, when you're trying. Surely men make passes at you all the time._

 _That's not what I mean, and you know it! Of course men try to get into my skirt. The difference is, he's trying to get into my **pants**!_

He's silent on the other end for a moment. _Well, at least your method of finding him out probably won't be replicated. Yours is a fairly rare situation._

You stare at the phone. Of fucking course he's going to be all silver lining about this shit.

As if to prove you right, he continues: _And, Olivier, am I correct in assuming that you too are interested in men? Have you considered that maybe you are each other's perfect solutions?_

You bark out a laugh. _Old man, you should get your head checked out. Can't have insanity pervading the higher echelons any more than it already does._

You mean it, too. Sure, the two of you would be perfect beards for each other. The problem is that you despise, resent and strangely sympathise with Mustang in equal measures, and that's a recipe for someone to end up in a shallow grave on the side of the road.

* * *

Finally you tell Mustang a categorical _no_. You haven't, til now, because you didn't really know what was going on, and because it's _Mustang_ , holy hell, you wouldn't have thought your response would actually matter to him. He's a fucking idiot that it does, and eventually he'll figure that out too, because the two of you would be a match made in hell. He's just looking for the right thing in all the wrong places. Or maybe the wrong thing in the right place. You're not really sure anymore.

* * *

As the Promised Day approaches, you consider your life.

You're not afraid of death, you don't need to settle any affairs – a Briggs man has to be ready to go at any moment.

You do wonder, though, what you might do if you survive.

Chop you hair off, you fantasise sometimes. It's a promise you make to yourself, that if fucking Mustang gets to be Führer, you're shaving your head and maybe even fishing out all those piercings out of your old room at the mansion.

You get to thinking, though, because Grumman always has been good at getting in your head.

Of course he's wrong about the specifics, because Mustang is the opposite of anything you ever wanted, but the thing is, you stopped wanting anyone, or at least stopped hoping for anyone, probably before you even started. You've always known there's something weird about you, and it seemed like an unforgivable stupidity to think that anyone could really see you and want you at the same time, but Mustang, deluded and repressed though he is, has shown you that maybe it's possible. Not him, obviously, but maybe there are other people out there who don't care about what's in your pants and only care for who you are and what you do. You've never been a romantic, and you're sure as shit not likely to start now, but maybe you don't have to live as isolated a life as you've always thought. Maybe even if it's not love, maybe even if it's not lust, you can find someone to just _know_ you, like Grumman does, but Grumman's more like some kind of mentor/parent type than your peer.

It might be nice. If you survive.

* * *

In the meantime, though, you have some Homunculi to kick in the face.


End file.
